The Waiting Game

I have always been a bit of a half-breed, at least when it comes to my metaphysical make-up. Basically since day one, literally, I have been a bit of at times been the odd man out, being born in the Indian (Native American) hospital in Alburquerque. Needless to say, there was no fear of a baby swapping incident happening. However, I feel that a part of New Mexico was indelibly infused into my soul here.

Sitting on a deck overlooking an unspoiled portion of the Sangre de Christo range of the Rocky Mountains, I do understand the oft-maligned metaphor of “sitting on a mountaintop,” whether physically or metaphysically to really re-charge one’s inner core, to find one's self. Sure, there are mockeries, satires, and spoofs of sitting on mountains for “enlightenment,” something that I have heard people scoff at, but I believe in it, to the very life-essence of my soul.

My friends and their kids, and my daughter, all just left to go down to the “village” below, while I am sitting up here alone, with the hummingbirds, grouse, mountain jays, ravens, crows, and unseen, but ever-present eagles. The chipmunks, (or ground squirrels), rabbits, bear, deer, wild turkeys, elk, and invisible mountain lions are around, chatting, foraging, sleeping, prowling, in short, living. But, one thing they don’t do is to wait for something, even if they are waiting.

That, I believe, is an unbreachable gap between us and the other animals on the planet, we wait for the future, but usually quite impatiently. Instead of allowing it to happen, we force it, press it, shape it, contemplate it, visualize it, and so on and are often bitter or surprised when it is not what we had imagined, and then usually seek some reason for why it was for better or for worse.


Krishnamurti, one of my metaphysical gurus, for lack of a better term, though for me, it is a perfect term, would often ask the question to his listeners, “Are you able to just sit somewhere and be alone?” Not meaning, without another person with you, but alone, truly alone? For him, the main blockage of that for people is K’s old stand-by of “fear.” We live with so much fear each day. Not fear of falling down the stairs, or getting lost somewhere, or losing our keys, but fear of being alone, completely and utterly alone, with just ourselves.

With the advances, if you wish to call them such, of technologies, it is nearly impossible to be physically disconnected from others in contemporary America for sure. Cell phones and iPads with 3G capacity allow us to be on the Internet, even on top of our mountains. To be able to call others, check Facebook, Twitter, or write blogs upon blogs upon blogs.

It makes being alone a challenge, a true effort. As it does for waiting. Often when we are waiting, we are checking our emails, surfing the Internet, posting on Facebook, writing blogs upon blogs upon blogs. Yadda, Yadda, blah, blah, blah, dribble, dribble, dribble. Same old shit we’ve been doing for years, right?

What is it that we are so afraid of when we think about the possibility of being alone then?

Something that I have contemplated quite a bit, and has been part of my academic work is the relationship between memory and death. My cousin was talking about a book she was reading the other day about an African concept of death and memory and that there are different levels of death. The truly dead are the ones that are forgotten. For as long as someone remembers you, you are not dead. This concept was also prevalent in Ancient Greece, as is seen in Homer and is played out in the trial and death of Socrates. You can die twice as a result, once physically, the other time when the last person alive on Earth has forgotten you.

When Socrates was on trial and was musing about the options of his imminent conviction, as it was clear that he was not gunning for an acquittal, he asks the court why he should be afraid of Death? Either it is nothing at all, but like a great sleep, or it is where he will be able to commune with the dead, and in his own words, to badger them with questions like he did while living on the streets of Athens. Why should he do anything different in death than he had in life? Indeed.

Many people have a “bucket list” now in America, made popular by the eponymous movie with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, two actors indeed showing their physical mortality. What is the impetus for a bucket list if not that one believes, that Time will soon be up. Hurry Up, It’s Time! cries the barkeep in Eliot’s Waste Land.

We are always worried about Time being Up. Done. Over.

Or, we worry about the future, because we feel that we are “waiting” for the future, waiting for Godot, waiting for someone new, waiting for something new, waiting for something old to be done, waiting for something new to begin, waiting.

 When are we going? When do we get there? What are we doing tonight? What are we doing next year for vacation? What’s for dinner? What do you want to do now?

But, it is never really, “What do you want to do NOW?” By no means do I think I am the first to make this observation, but I think that it is important enough to repeat, and ask the question, borrowing from Morrissey and The Smiths, “How Soon is Now?” Are we even in the Here and Now as Ram Dass suggested? Can we be?

“Now” is either too soon or too late, seldom, if ever, just right. Supposedly, and it is cornerstone in Joycean folklore, when James Joyce and W. B. Yeats met for the first and only time, when the former was not-yet known and the latter was at his zenith of repute, Joyce, being  cocksure and portentous, remarked to the elder Poet, “We have met too late; you are too old to be influenced by me.” As Kelso would say, “Buuurnnn.”

We are always meeting ourselves too late as well, seeing ourselves coming and going in our own lives, too old to be educated by life’s lessons. As my young daughter says if I point out something, she retorts, “I know that” (which she usually does).

We often feel that our lives are interminably plagued by the great “if” of the phrases such as, “what if?” or “if only...” or “if I had known...” and so on.

We are really only waiting for one thing, to die. That is not fatalistic, but as the saying goes, only Death and Taxes are certain. For the rest, we are waiting for an imagined future, a fabrication of desires and wants, but not reality. Some of those may become a reality, but, by and large, they will never exist, only be approximations, a calculus of disappointments or successes and/or exceeded/failed expectations, but rarely what we had convinced ourselves of what we were waiting for. And then, we blame fate, or chance, or "bad karma", but in reality, we have no one else to blame but ourselves for being uncomfortable with waiting.

When Socrates was condemned to death, in normal circumstances, the sentence would have been carried out the following day.

Instead, there was a religious holiday involving the envoy of a ship to and from the island of Delos, to propitiate the god Apollo, the one whose oracle had set Socrates on his quest of self-knowledge and making an infamous reputation for himself by becoming the Athenian gadfly. The boat’s return to Athens was delayed by bad weather, and Socrates was given a reprieve of about a month’s time to “wait” for his punishment to be carried out.

He literally then, was waiting to die.

What he did in that time is what I find to be most remarkable and to be the blood and marrow of the Curse of Socrates.